Trump Caves to Big Math — Uses Numerically Possible Percentages in Local Interview

After claiming the impossible dozens of times over the past few years, President Donald Trump used appropriate expressions of percentage price reductions in a local news interview.

Trump has spent years claiming he will or has cut the cost of prescription drugs by many hundreds of percent — as high as 1,500 percent. He continued to make the claims despite fact-check after fact-check pointing out that this is not how percentages work.

On Wednesday, Trump gave a speech in Ohio and a rally in Kentucky, with a local news interview in between. WKRC’s Tyler Madden asked Trump to preview his message to the Kentucky crowd.

Trump bragged about his prescription drug effort by using percentages that did not exceed 100 and did not suggest there were two ways to express it. The president, however, still managed some false or exaggerated claims:

WKRC REPORTER TYLER MADDEN: Got a crowd in Northern Kentucky. What’s going to be your message?

Talking Trump, our accent, lowering prices here today. What’s gonna be your message to them in Northern Kentucky?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, the biggest thing is medicines. I mean, I brought it down.

We have now, we went from the highest price in the entire world, we paid more than any other country, and now we’re gonna pay the lowest price in the entire world. And that’s never happened.

We have medicine reduced by 70, 80, 90% percent.

We have pills that would sell for $10 in London, selling for $135 in New York. I mean the whole thing was crazy. And we fixed the system, and we got it done.

And people said it wasn’t… They weren’t able to get it done in the past. I don’t even think they tried.

But we got done and we did a job like nobody else could have done.

Other administrations have made successful efforts to lower prescription drugs, and the U.S. is nowhere near paying the “lowest price in the entire world” — pharmaceutical companies are still raising prices on hundreds of medications.

Watch above via WKRC-TV Local 12.

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